Burt Rutan: Final Frontiersman

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If Burt Rutan stopped innovating right now, he would have a firm place in aerospace history for his dozens of radical aircraft designs and their many records. He created the first plane to circle the globe nonstop (Voyager, in 1986) and the first private craft to take a pilot to space, twice within two weeks -- SpaceShipOne, which won the Ansari X Prize in 2004.

Now, Rutan is working to make space travel cheap enough-and safe enough-for ordinary people to experience. If anyone can pull that off, says Apollo 11 astronaut and PM editorial adviser Buzz Aldrin, it's probably Rutan. "He is the apparent leader" in private spaceflight, Aldrin says. "He has public support, and it's very well deserved." Rutan and Richard Branson have formed The Spaceship Co. to produce SpaceShipTwo and its airborne launch vehicle, White Knight Two. The goal: to fly customers as high as 85 miles -- suborbital, but plenty high to experience weightlessness and an angel's-eye view of the Earth.

What will SpaceShipTwo look like?

Rutan: I think the public will be surprised at how large it is. We are building 11-place commuter airliners. If you're going to send somebody to a resort hotel in orbit, it's okay to cramp him into something small with a little window. Because when he gets there he has this big spacious hotel, and he gets his view and his weightless experience. But with suborbital spaceflight, your destination has to be your transfer van. We believe the people -- and there will be large numbers of them at the cost at which this can be done -- they'll want to float around and look out of large windows facing all directions.

Rutan: I believe in its first 12 years, the ship I'm building in the shop can fly 100,000 people. And when you fly that many people to space, you'll have somebody figure out things to do that we don't even know about.

And further in the future?

Rutan: In my lifetime I want to see affordable trips to the moon -- maybe not landing on the moon, but certainly swinging by it in that wonderful, big elliptical orbit. It will be a lot more fun than orbiting the Earth, because it doesn't have an atmosphere and the perigee can be as low as you want. I think in 500 years, most of the people that go to the solar system's other planets won't come back to the Earth. They'll stay there and raise their families.